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Sapphire HD4870x2 Atomic Review

Testing:

At OverclockersClub.com, we use a set of benchmarks to stress the graphics card. We will use a series of gaming benchmarks, some that are more seasoned, to show how well the Sapphire Atomic HD4870x2 compares to some of the other enthusiast video cards on the market. I will be using both single and multiple GPU models to compare the performance of the R700 Revolution. All driver settings and clock speeds will be left at factory defaults for both the CPU and GPU in an effort to minimize or eliminate any variables that could impact the results. The test system used in this review is listed below. After testing the card at stock speeds, I'll overclock it to see what kind of performance can be gained. All testing is done with the default settings in the respective control panels, as well as default settings in the BIOS of the motherboard used in this test. For this round of testing, our drivers have been updated to 177.79 for the Nvidia cards and Catalyst 8.12 for the ATI video cards used in this review. The exception being the Far Cry 2 testing, for that test the Nvidia driver used is 180.43 and the ATI driver is the FarCry Hotfix driver.

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire Atomic HD4870x2 832/1040

Since Sapphire has already clocked the GPU core speeds up around the point where the other 4870X2s I have looked at have started to crash, I was pretty sure there was not going to be a whole lot left on the table. 800MHz on each core is a decent clock speed that proved to be stable. By increasing the clock speed 10MHz at a time I was able to push to the limits in the Catalyst Control Center at 850MHz on the Rv770 cores. At this speed I was able to run 3DMark06 at 1920x1200 successfully. After that I moved to the memory using the same methodology and only reached 1040 before I started seeing missing textures and multi colored blocks. Unfortunately, even with the water cooled system the Atomic would only pass the whole test suite at 832/1040. This does happen to be the highest GPU clock speed I have been able to negotiate through our test suite with. On the other hand, the Hynix memory gave up the ghost at 1040MHz, a full 100MHz short of the Qimonda GDDR5 used on the Palit R700 Revolution I just recently tested. With the small overclocks there really wasn't a noticeable increase in performance but the extra horsepower will come in handy when you bump up the CPU clock speeds.